Klaas Waslander Blog

Goed news, now there is a Dutch Flex user group. Well… good news for people in The Netherlands.

Great to see that Albumprinter made it Red Herring’s list of 200 finalists for the top 100 tech startups in Europe.

We have only recently been introducing Agile development practices in a more serious manner at Albumprinter, so I guess that has not been taken into account.

I can write lots about this, but instead of that: register yourself at this site and draw your conclusion:

http://www.agilecertificationnow.com/

Found this really funny article about what GMail would be like if it had been designed by Microsoft:

What If GMail Had Been Designed by Microsoft?

Quote from the article:

“Another security measurement we’ll add is that you won’t be able to log-in with just username anymore but are required to enter the full username@gmail.com. Furthermore, we will change the browser URL from http://gmail.microsoft.com to the more professional looking http://by114w.bay114.gmail.live.com/mail/mail.aspx?rru=home.”

Today I decided it was time to do it, and modify all my domain’s MX records to point to Google Apps.

I had a few 100 MBs of email archives lying around, mainly in existing GMail accounts. Importing the existing GMail archive into the new Google Apps email account turns out to be simple: In the new Google Apps email account I simply configured a POP account pointing to pop.gmail.com.

Very nice: I noticed that both gmail and google apps report more and more Gigabytes of storage per hour now - Google is upgrading available user storage today! It was 2 GB earlier today, and now it has doubled already. Since Hotmail offers 5 GB standard, and Yahoomail unlimited storage, they had to do something of course.

So far, Google Apps has blown me away: it was very easy to get my own branded environment and setup multiple user accounts. For businesses this must be very attractive! It is too bad that Google Apps will always show google as domain when working with it; your own URLs can be setup as starting URLs (simply add CNAME records for that), but those will redirect to google as soon as you are working. Other thing is that it would be nice if more of the look&feel could be customized, even if it was just background and a header/footer.

I can recommend Google Apps to anyone looking for a good mail/calendar/documents solution for private or small business use.

In the past years a lot of low-entry biometrics has entered our lives, like fingerprint recognition standard on laptops, fingerprint recognition for authentication on any PC, and iris recognition on airports, and other examples.

So far, biometrics is hardly ever applied your own home. While I was thinking about that and browsing left and right I found out that fingerprint recognition is actually quite easy to add to your home! The ekey tocahome costs around €400 in Europe, which seems worth it to me although I haven’t read about actual experience with the device yet.

I’m wondering how long it will take until this or alternative biometrics becomes standard and gets accepted widely - after all fingerprints are as save as keys which are not unique anyway but unique across usually a few thousand locks. Compare that to the uniqueness of fingerprints, of which you can safely assume it is unique across at least 50,000 persons (according to this The Register article).

Let me know if you get one of these devices yourselves - otherwise I have to try it out myself some time soon.

What a week it has been! Monday morning 7:10am I heard the news that our Photobook plant was burning and that the whole place with all presses and equipment could be considered lost: it was at nu.nl and here a news publication with lots of pictures.

The firemen were focusing on saving the serverroom from the start, which was amazing to see. When I arrived at 9:30am in The Hague, the sight was terrible. After talking to the firemen we agreed that we would try and save all backup tapes and servers first once the firemen agreed it was save to move in. At 11:30 it was the time, and a guy from our team went in with gas mask on and came out with secure servers and backup tapes! We managed to reach Norman data security in Hoofddorp and they started working on the servers immediately: they had been too hot and too much smoke got in to be able to turn them on without damaging anything.

The rest of the week we formed a crisis team and within one day we had a new temporary location already. Within 36 hours the first new presses were being installed again and we had a new cutting machine already standing there. At the same time I was preparing the IT infrastructure with new hardware, networking equipment and internet connections. By the end of Wednesday, only 2 and a half days after the fire we were already producing the photo products again! What an accomplishment. I was amazed by the dedication and teamwork of all of us, and the way partner companies and suppliers did the best they could. What would normally be a 3-month project, we did without any preparation in just 3 days…

The complete story is up on our corporate weblog now. What a week it has been… http://blog.albumprinter.com/

Check out http://microformats.org/ to discover a set of easy to use conventions for embedding semantics in HTML. Microformats tries to add more semantics to the web we currently know. This is a pragmatic approach that contrasts with initiatives like the semantic web in it’s pragmatism.

The microformats standardize ways to describe calendaring, business cards and vote-for links. For example to demonstrate how down to earth it is, the voting-for links enable you to express whether you agree or disagree with a certain link you put in your page:

<a rev="vote-for" xhref="http://some.domain.com">some.domain.com</a>

This example would link to the some.domain.com website and using the “rev” attribute you would express the fact that you disagree with this site. Indexing and tracking applications can then take that into account.

Check out the other microformat specifications! Or read this excellent microformats introduction.

Major part of my inspiration for setting up IT efficiently at my current company comes from this book by the people behind Ruby On Rails and other great stuff: Getting Real.

It introduces various best practices in building web oriented applications, such as: build less, fix time and budget / flex scope, do what you are passionate about, etc. etc.

The book goes on and on, and I believe this is worth reading for anyone who is frustrated about the way their projects go, the way software is being built, and the way applications are released. I do sense a lot of “eXtreme Programming” practices in this work, but it looks at things from a slightly different angle which is refreshing and definitely worked for me!

I have decided and the word is out: I will join AlbumPrinter in Amsterdam starting January 1st, 2007. In my new role as CTO I will be streamlining development, operations and IT planning teams and processes.

Albumprinter (www.albumprintersoftware.com) is the global leading and award winning enabler of personal publishing solutions, like photo books. This is a white label solution for photo retailers, photo finishers, photo labs and online communities.

The desktop editing software, the websites and the back-end platform are developed in-house. First thing to do is to recruit a good team of developers and system engineers. Luckily there are some really good professionals already working at AlbumPrinter!

Major developments are done in .NET, and I have decided that that is the preferred option. If some really good Java boys/girls show interest though, there is an option to create a long-term strategic personal publishing platform in Java. So this depends on the success of the recruitment efforts. Still, having one technology platform (.NET) is preferable. Downside is that we cannot easily start hosting on Linux, which is why I do not completely close the door towards a Java-based back-end, depending on the candidates that show up.

I will miss the colleagues and challenges ahead at Tiscali, I had a fantastic time there! Joining AlbumPrinter as CTO feels as a natural “next step”. I’m really looking forward to the challenge.

Checkout the website: http://www.albumprinter.com/ !